Last
week a satirical website posted a photo of Pope Francis on the plane
speaking to reporters, and “quoted” the Holy Father as saying:
“Since my friends in the media twist everything I say, I decided to
give a 12,000-word interview....”

And
lo and behold, by artfully recombining sound-bites, major newspapers
and cable networks made it sound like the Holy Father, in his recent
interview with Antonio Spadaro, S.J., was calling for an end to the
Church’s “obsession” about abortion, etc., downplaying dogma
and recommending a new approach to the world of the twenty-first
century.

The
simplest way to deal with the misleading impressions gleefully
created by the mainstream media is to quote Catholic leaders who have
spoken personally with the Pope since he gave the interview in
August.

Sanctity
of Life

Fr.
Frank Pavone was dining with the Holy Father in his residence a few
days ago when he first received text messages from alarmed Catholics
asking, “Is the Pope saying we should talk less about abortion?”
Fr. Pavone headlined his response, posted at the Priests For Life
website, “No, the Pope is not diluting the anti-abortion focus of
the Church.”

Pope Francis
preaches on pro-life in a very integral way. He gives strong and
clear messages that derive from the very substance of the Faith and a
very broad vision of the demands that Faith places upon us. The
conclusions and applications for the pro-life movement are
undeniable, even if he does not use the specific words “pro-life
movement” and “unborn.”

This was very clear in his
homily at his installation on March 19, when he spoke of the need to
protect every person, especially children, from the “Herods” of
our day who plot death....

In his recent interview, he made it
clear that the Church should put opposition to abortion “in
context”.... The Pope wants to see the renunciation of abortion
put in the context of mercy toward the mother, and this is consistent
with the pro-life movement’s emphasis on “loving them both.” In
fact, in my personal conversations with the Pope, he particularly
urged me to go forward with the work of Rachel’s Vineyard, the
largest ministry in the world for healing after abortion. He called
it an “excellent work.”

Church
Dogma

Coincidentally, two
days after the papal interview was published in Jesuit magazines
worldwide, the Pope made
several new appointments in the Roman Curia and confirmed that
Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller will remain at his post as Prefect
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Abp. Müller
granted an interview to the German news agency KNA that same day, in
which he said:

It
is not true that other bishops or Pope Benedict XVI in their
proclamation of the faith spoke constantly about abortion, sexual
morality or euthanasia. And pastoral ministry is not just a
therapeutic game. It intends to serve mankind with the Word of God.
Therefore it makes no sense to pit teaching about Christian faith and
morals against a pastoral approach.

In
other words, the Church’s perennial dogmatic and moral theology is
the foundation of her pastoral ministry. The interviewer went on to
remark, “If I understand Francis correctly, he would like the
national bishops’ conferences to take more responsibility
themselves, particularly in disputed questions,” suggesting that
the Catholic Church in certain countries might make its own rules
about divorce and remarriage, intercommunion with Protestants, etc.
The CDF Prefect clarified:

Locally
the Bishop of the Church teaches and governs. The papacy and the
episcopal ministry are of divine right, while the bishops’
conferences are not. They are working groups, but without any
doctrinal competence of their own beyond the authority of the
individual bishop. They are therefore not a third court of appeal
between the pope and the bishops. And so I do not think that central
competencies will now be relinquished to the individual states as in
the reform of a federalist system of government. The Church is just
not constituted in that way, according to the teaching of the Second
Vatican Council.

Put another way, there will not and cannot be any “decentralization”
in the Church that would give episcopal conferences authority to
change Catholic faith and morals.

Confronting
the Culture

Archbishop
Charles J. Chaput, in his weekly column dated September 25, notes
that he too was in Rome when the papal interview was released and
therefore was unavailable for comment on news and talk shows. (He
wryly calls this “an unusual blessing”.) The Archbishop of
Philadelphia described two sorts of responses to the interview that
he observed in the messages that he had received from the faithful:
“Some people grasped at the interview like a lifelineor a
vindication.... More common though were emails from catechists,
parents and everyday Catholics confused by the headlines suggesting
that the Church had somehow changed her teaching....”

We
can draw some useful lessons from these reactions. First,
we need to be very careful in taking mass media coverage of the
Catholic Church at face value. Second,
we need to actually read the Holy Father’s interview for
ourselves,
and pray over it, and then read it again, especially in light of the
Year of Faith. A priest here in Philadelphia asked for a show
of hands at a Mass last Sunday, and nearly everyone in the church,
which was full, had heard about the Pope’s interview. But
only five persons had actually read it. Third
and finally,
we need to open our hearts  all of us  and let God lead us
where he needs us to go through the words of the Holy Father.

After
these remarks about Catholics, Archbishop Chaput makes a second
point, about the culture and the need for a Catholic response to it.

Among
the many vital things the Pope reminds us of in his interview is the
new and drastically different condition of the modern world that God
seeks to save. It’s one thing to argue about abortion and
sexuality when both disputants in the debate share the same basic
moral framework and language, the same meaning to words like
“justice”, the same set of beliefs about the nature of the human
person. But it’s quite another thing when we no longer have
that common vocabulary. The modern world is mission territory.
It’s morally fractured.... The modern heart can only be won
back by a radical witness of Christian discipleship  a renewed
kind of shared community life obedient to God’s Commandments, but
also on fire with the Beatitudes lived more personally and joyfully
by all of us.

About the Author

Michael J. Miller

Michael J. Miller translated Introduction to the Mystery of the Church by Benoit-Dominique de la Soujeole, O.P., for Catholic University of America Press.

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